Monday, March 08, 2004

Carpets and tables and chairs

Bought three woolen carpets made India. They are all the same design and are shades of green with a few squiggles around the border. Two of them go down the hall and the big one is in the living room. They are thick and warm, and very pleasent.

Bought four Alvar Aalto chairs from Artek They are white with yellow leather seats. They were expensive and that was even when we bought them as seconds.

Went to IKEA once again and got a couple of tables for the living room. They were not expensive. They were made out of solid birch, and someone in the far east has made them.

There you have it. Why do you buy chairs by a famous Finnish designer that are very expensive, but are supposedly excellent design and build and at the same time buy cheap imports from an anonymous far eastern country, becasue you have to cover some floor space in you living room.

Form and functionality. I would like a house to have only those things in it that you use. Trinkets and ornimentation are just eye candy. I want a bed to sleep in, a chair to sit in, a shower to wash in, a cooker to cook on, a refrigerator to store my food, curtains to shield me from the sun. You have to decide what you want first of all, and after that decide what it will look like, and more specifically what it will look like together with all the other stuff you need to aquire.

It usually turns out to be a mess, becasue you do not remember shapes or colours or textures and when all the items that you buy are brought together they fight with each other. Paints get retired to the basement, furniture gets moved into the attic or given away, plain stupid purchases are never used and are hidden away, or discretely consigned to the rubbish dump.

It is not an easy task. Our desires bring us pain.

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